Family, Friends, and Neighbors
Children ages five and under spend a substantial amount of time being cared for by parents, extended family, friends, neighbors (FFNs) or a combination. These providers play a critical role in supporting the health and development of the young children in their care. Not much focus, however, has been given to ensuring that informal/FFN care providers have high quality resources, tools, and community networks they need to be successful in their roles.
In 2015, the Packard Foundation launched their Informal Care Strategy aimed at supporting parents, extended family and other informal caregivers to know how to provide the kind of nurturing and enrichment children need early in life to reach their full potential. The purpose of this work was to test strategies to provide information to FFN caregivers, connect them with resources, as well as each other, and support them in providing quality care. This report summarizes evaluation findings from the second cohort of five grantees that started their testing and learning experiments in 2017.
